March 15, 2010

A few months ago, the experts at Right Management surveyed more than 900 workers in North America, asking a seemingly innocuous question: “Do you plan to pursue new job opportunities as the economy improves in 2010?”

These were the responses

60% said they intend to leave in 2010

21% said they might, so they’re networking

6% said it wasn’t likely, but they have an updated resume

And only 13% stated their intention is to stay in their present job

You can look at this data in two contexts.

First, you can think of what it means on the employee level and glean some pretty useful plans. You can ‘do the math’ and realize you might be needing to replace up to 87% of your workforce. You can hire another recruiter – or ten. You can change your comp and incentive plans to try to keep your mission-critical people. You can even start cross training, internship, mentoring, engagement, and similar programs.

Or, for something completely different, you can think about your workforce as a human infrastructure. How could it have become so fragile? How can it be restored? What have we been missing? How can we avoid repeating the same mistakes?

Obviously something has been missing, and there’s a good chance that you need to learn the ‘new math’ of valuing people’s performance in teams. And to avoid making the same mistakes, get answers to these questions before you launch a massive recruiting drive:

What do we really need to accomplish: adding more people, or building a sustainable human infrastructure?

If it’s true that people leave managers, not companies, what’s the best way to identify and support managers who naturally get people to ‘stick around’, and how can we replicate their success?

Are we using measurements that were designed to identify teaming characteristics and to solve team performance problems? If not, why not?

Have we structured our teams correctly, ensuring that the teaming characteristics of the people are a good fit to the functional mission of the team?

And finally:
What’s our strategy for identifying and dealing the people who just don’t fit – never have and never will?

Could it be that you never had the right people on the bus in the first place?

August 8, 2009

A pair of White Papers on valuation of the human infrastructure of organizations are scheduled for publication by SHRM in the coming weeks and as word gets around my C level colleagues are asking me for the quick description of CHI Indicators. Herewith is the executive summary:

Certain derivatives of an organization or team’s Role-Based Assessments are processed and the result is a set of indicators that measure the coherency of the human infrastructure and some key ratios that provide for the fuller picture. This is analogous to the CFO’s balance sheet or the PE’s evaluation of a building’s (or city’s) infrastructure. It allows for the immediate identification of the causes of problems – bottlenecks, unwarranted high-risk behaviors, serious operational failures – and it provides the roadmap to fixing them.

Nothing like this has ever existed before. It will change the way we lead, we manage, we plan, and we work.